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Re: Pictures of AMD's newest GPUs: R7 250, R7 260X, and the R9s

More seriously, will be interesting to see if the industry picks up on Mantle. That would be the kind of thing that could make me buy AMD exclusively like I used to 3DFX back in the day.

I don't know if I actually believe it will, but theres almost enough there to get me to believe. The fact that the next gen consoles both are based on GCN with Mantle as an option there means that people will be using it already... the work will have already be done to be coding at a very low level, so the barrier to uptake is much lower than a PC exclusive low-level API, which I think would have about 0 shot at making it into the mainstream. I found this quote at Anandtech interesting (emphasis mine):

Originally Posted by Anandtech

In fact that the significance of developers in this entire process should not be understated. Mantle exists because itís faster than high level APIs, it makes porting low level console code to the PC easier, and as it turns out, because itís something developers have been telling AMD they want. More than anything else about Mantle, this is the point AMD has been trying to drive home, as they are well aware of the potential controversy Mantle would bring. Mantle doesnít just exist because AMD wants to leverage their console connection, but Mantle exists because developers want to leverage it too.

AT is reading into that maybe a bit deeper into that than whats really there.. all it really says is that devs want a low level API, not that devs want a low level API so they can port low level code on to the PC, but the fact that devs are asking for it means it will probably get used at some level.

And since its in Frostbite 3 for BF4, it does seem clear that this is what AMD was talking about when they were saying that BF4 would be optimized for AMD GPU's

Re: Pictures of AMD's newest GPUs: R7 250, R7 260X, and the R9s

This has the potential to be the biggest coup in computer gaming since GLIDE.

If the reason AMD APUs were deemed acceptable for the consoles is the MANTLE API and the devs all code for it from the start, and add D3d as an afterthought or not at all, no one has much reason to buy NVIDIA GPUs. (at least for computer gaming)